JLab's experimental physics compute farm is transitioning to production
service with Fedora 8 running PBS/Maui scheduling and resource management.
Beginning Monday May 22 the cluster will transition to friendly-user mode;
if no major problems are uncovered the cluster will transition to full
production on Monday June 2.
During this week, the production PBS server will be installed and the
RHEL3 PBS nodes converted to Fedora 8. On Monday May 22 the cluster
will have
all 80 nodes running F8, with both the 'production' and 'fedora' track jobs
running on these F8 machines. Also, the Auger PBS web pages will be
moved from
the scdev development machine into production and opened offsite, and a
second
interactive machine will be added as IFARML5.
If no major problems are encountered during this friendly-user mode, full
production will begin on Monday, June 2. We will then begin moving current
RHEL3/LSF production batch and interactive nodes to F8/PBS, roughly 1/3 of
the farm and one IFARM each month in June, July and August. The RHEL3/LSF
environment will completely be converted by September, before the lab's
RedHat and LSF support agreements expire.
The major difference on Fedora 8 machines is the 2.6 kernel with default
compiler
gcc 4.1.2; RHEL3 machines have 2.4 kernels with gcc 3.2.3.
Time limits for interactive and batch scientific computing jobs are
being adjusted
to make better use of limited resources. On interactive nodes,
processes will
be niced after 30 minutes and killed after one hour of CPU usage. On
batch nodes,
default job length wall time will be 1 day, with a maximum of 3 days.
The system
will be configured to give lower priority to long jobs. These measures
will help
avoid the problems the LSF cluster often had with simulation jobs
starving out data
analysis. For general purpose computing, users are encouraged to use
the JLABL*
machines.
More information is available at
https://wiki.jlab.org/cc/external/wiki/index.php/Scientific_Computing#Auger-PBS_.28new.29
As always, email comments/questions to farm@jlab.org, or for assistance
email
helpdesk@jlab.org.